Tor Releases another Snapshot on the Road to Major Onion Router Updates

The Tor Project’s Nick Mathewson announced that on Nov. 8th, another release of an Alpha Development snapshot for Tor 0.2.9, The Onion Router, would be released.

Coming three weeks after 0.2.9.4 Alpha, Tor .0.2.9.5 added a great number of bug fixes and overall improvements for issues that have been reported since its predecessors release by Tor’s development team. This release takes us one step closer to the grand release of the newest major updates of The Onion Router network:

We’re getting closer to stable, but we still need testing. Tor 0.2.9.5-alpha fixes numerous bugs discovered in the previous alpha version. We believe one of two probably remain, and we encourage everyone to test this release.

This is the fifth released snapshot of Tor 0.2.9, a series of developments that adds a multitude of changes including client performance and reliability, download scheduling fixing, and client directory scheduling changes. The hidden services, portability, single onion services, logging, as well as unit testing areas have all been upgraded for Tor 0.2.9.5 Alpha. Also updated were GeoIP and GeoIP6; to Maxmind GeoLite2 Country database.

The newest Alpha is available for download, across all platforms of course, as always. The development team asks users to keep in mind this is a pre-release version, and isn’t designed to be used in production environments just yet. The developers at Tor work tirelessly to bring users the most up to date, advanced anonymity software available. The open source nature of all releases will forever ensure users they are getting genuine, well-built programs; free from any outside influence from law enforcement.

Taking into account the paranoia some Tor users are suffering right now, as Dec. 1st looms in the distance; developers with the Tor team have proven time and time again that their efforts are not in vain. For some, Tor is the front line of their anonymity protection, and as we saw in Turkey recently, Tor is somewhat of a lifeline for those being oppressed all over the globe.

Only time will tell if Tor and The Onion Router Anonymity Network will survive in the ever growing, ever changing battle for online rights and privacy. On one side, you have teams of law enforcement and special agencies fighting to unmask Tor users due to the mass online drug market hysteria going on; and on the other, we have countless cyber teams, and individuals fighting to keep online privacy software such as Tor, alive and thriving.